“I’d rather die, but I’m never going to be engaged.”
“Okay, then, we have that settled. Get in my car.”
She let him lead her to his car and let her into the passenger side. She was so tired, and she probably was too drunk to drive. Especially with a cop watching. She had enough trouble with the police as it was.
“What does she do?” she asked Black as he got in the driver’s side and slammed the door.
“What does who do?”
“Your fiancée.”
“Oh.” He turned the key in the ignition. “She’s a teacher.”
Beth leaned back in her seat and watched him. It was fun to interrogate him for once, instead of the other way around. “What does she teach?”
“Kindergarten.”
Beth laughed. “You’re dating a kindergarten teacher?”
He stiffened as he pulled out of the parking lot. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Do you actually think that’s going to work?”
“Why wouldn’t it work? We love each other.”
Beth wasn’t convinced, but then again, she knew absolutely nothing about what love looked like. She only had her parents’ example. “She’s a teacher, and you’re a detective,” she said.
“I believe we’ve established that.”
“You work long hours. Your business is dead people. You can’t even tell her about anything you do. Did you see those dead men?”
Black stiffened, and she knew he had, both at the crime scenes and later, when the bodies were on slabs in a cold room somewhere. “Jesus, Beth, you’re something else,” he said, and it wasn’t a compliment.
Beth licked her lips, tasting the last of the vodka on them. No one liked her. She was used to that. She had beauty and money and sex appeal, and she slept alone every night while everyone she’d ever met told the press she was likely a murderer.
“Do you drink?” she asked him.
“I have the occasional beer.”
“A glass of wine at Christmas,” she said, thinking of her parents’ liquor cabinet, which was stocked from floor to ceiling. All those bottles had seemed rich to her as a child, their deep blacks and browns and greens, their jewel-colored labels. Her mother had always liked to drink, but the drinking had been out of control after Julian died—she’d started every morning and she never stopped. She’d made a run at emptying that cabinet, and Beth had done the same. And the pills . . . Her mother had been taking those pills.
Black made a turn, heading up the hill to Arlen Heights in the darkness. Here, outside the city, there were no streetlights, no headlights behind them, barely any light at all. “You know,” Detective Black said, his voice calm, “we’re alone together in this car, and anything you say is off the record. Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”
Suddenly, she was enraged. Absolutely enraged. That he thought she would fall for all of this: his handsomeness, his offer of a ride, his white-knight act when she was alone in the middle of the night. How stupid he thought she was. And then she realized. “You weren’t following me at all,” she said, rage making her voice tight. “Someone else was following me—one of the lesser cops. And when he saw me go into that bar, he called you.”
Detective Black was silent.
“You came out and took over and told him to go home,” Beth said, “because you wanted to talk to me alone. You thought it was a good opportunity, because I’m drunk and lonely. You could charm me, make me feel special. Make me feel like we’re friends. Get me to talk to you.”